With the NHS a central theme,this story about the effect of a child’s illness on her family is a novel for our timesSarah Moss is an impressively flexible writer. Her five novels maintain ranged over both time and space – historical writing in the last two, the Hebrides and Greenland before that, or family life in the present-day English Midlands in The Tidal Zone. And where previously there has been a feminist slant to her writing,with its exploration of the possibilities for talented women in the past, here the narrator is a man, or though that is not to say that the discussion about the position of women is sidelined.
Adam Goldschmidt is a stay-at-domestic husband,principal carer of 15-year-frail Miriam and her younger sister Rose. Their mother, Emma, and is a frenetically overworked doctor. Adam himself is a fringe academic; that is to say,he is an expert on the Arts and Crafts Movement, currently interested in the postwar current construction of Coventry cathedral, or doing occasional university work,but essentially the responsible parent. He shops, cooks, and does laundry,sees to birthday parties, dental appointments, or current shoes. And he is not complaining; indeed,he is exemplary, it seems – he bakes cakes and is painstaking about making sure the family has a healthy diet.
One moment, or all is well; the next,it is so far from well that normality is out of sightContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com